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Friday, December 7, 2012

Our take on Mitch McConnell's "self-filibuster"

AFJ released this statement on a spectacle that was absurd even by U.S. Senate standards:

AFJ: McCONNELL “SELF-FILIBUSTER” ILLUSTRATES HOW GOP

TURNS IT INTO “WEAPON OF MASS OBSTRUCTION”

WASHINGTON,
D.C., Dec. 7: The spectacle of the Minority Leader of the United States Senate
filibustering his own bill perfectly illustrates the extent to which the
filibuster has been abused for purely partisan purposes, according to the Alliance
for Justice.

Yesterday,
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) introduced a bill to allow the President to raise
the federal debt ceiling on his own authority.
The idea was to show that Democrats didn’t have the votes to pass such a
measure. But when it turned out the
Democrats did have the votes, McConnell was in a bind. His only way out: filibuster his own bill.

“If we didn’t
know better we’d think Sen. McConnell was moonlighting as a writer for The Daily Show or The Colbert Report,” said Nan Aron, President of the Alliance for
Justice. “But Sen. McConnell’s theater-of-the-absurd
actually illustrates an extremely serious problem: the paralysis in the Senate
caused by Republican abuse of the filibuster.

“The
filibuster was intended to be used in extreme circumstances, where fundamental
principles were at stake,” said Aron. “But
Senate Republicans have turned it into a weapon of mass obstruction to bring
the business of the Senate to a halt.

“Nowhere is this more apparent than
in our federal courts. As
we document in our recent report, Senate Republicans repeatedly have abused
the filibuster to block votes on nominees for federal judgeships – including noncontroversial
nominees with broad bipartisan support.
That’s led to unconscionable delays and severe hardship for hundreds of
thousands of Americans, forced to wait months, sometimes years to fight for
their rights in court.

“That’s why it’s time to ring down
the curtain on the theater of the absurd and enact serious reforms to Senate
rules.”